30 Years.
2,236 Connections.

I joined LinkedIn in early 2007, still at PC Magazine — a place I'd survived the dot-com bust and 9/11. We were writing stories about social networks, Facebook among them. A professional network made sense.

It was also the year I launched my freelance business and put my portfolio online for the first time. Legacy media was fully in the throes of digital disruption and people were doing whatever it took to stay connected and employable. The first iPhone had just dropped. Something was shifting — you could feel it.

Watch the blue cluster forming in the upper left. That's 18 years of colleagues, finally mapped.

After 18 years — almost straight out of college — I was laid off from PC Magazine. The print edition would go monthly in 2008, then disappear entirely in 2009. The writing was on the wall.

It was surreal. I'd joined in an era when we were still firmly entrenched in the old world. During my time there I witnessed the birth of the internet, the smartphone, and social media — three forces that have transformed the planet in ways I'm still not sure feel entirely like progress. By the time I left, we were hurtling toward the future whether we liked it or not.

I freelanced for them for about another year.

Watch the blue stream slow... but not quite stop.

I didn't rush after PC Magazine. Twenty-six weeks of severance bought me time to breathe. A former colleague planted a seed at BusinessWeek and by July 2008 I had a freelance gig there three days a week — just as Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac and the big banks were all unraveling at once.

In fall 2009 Bloomberg acquired BusinessWeek and converted me to staff. Biometric fingerprint reader, Bloomberg terminal training, the works. What none of us knew was that from January to March 2010 they were quietly training an entirely new art staff to replace us. The axe fell on March 11th. It was a bloodbath.

A few months later, John Korpics brought me in as contract graphics editor at Fortune — a magazine with a long, storied history in both design and information graphics. It was a master class. I was creating, but also farming full-page infographics to some of the best in the business and overseeing the magazine's move onto iPad. My final project: a special Apple org chart that Steve Jobs himself signed off on.

Then that chapter ended too.

Two new blue clusters, smaller than PC Magazine but dense. The purple music world kept growing through all of it — a parallel life that never stopped.

By summer 2011 my freelance business was running hot — steady on-site work at Dow Jones, multiple irons in the fire. Then two things happened at once.

The Wall Street Journal came calling. Multiple colleagues were advocating for me. I got all the way to a final interview with the Editor in Chief. The job was essentially mine.

At that exact moment, a tech recruiter reached out about an ad tech startup called Vindico — looking for someone who could design dashboards and elevate their sales decks. I walked into that interview armed with the WSJ offer and played hardball. I named my price, told them I needed an answer in 48 hours, and the CEO delivered.

I turned down the Wall Street Journal.

438 new connections in 2011 alone. Watch the network detonate.

I didn't want to go to Yahoo. I'd written them off after the data breaches — a tech company that had been first but not best. Then my former Fortune boss Andy Serwer, now Editor in Chief of Yahoo Finance, came calling. A month after my Vindico layoff I had an interview. Within a week of that I had the gig.

I arrived at their Times Square offices in June 2017, floating between News and Finance — making graphics about the opioid epidemic, Trump's Russian connections, market timelines, and anything their product team didn't have the chops to build. A year in I co-created the Daily Digit, a short video series putting big numbers in visual context. Just before my contract expired, the finance team offered me a staff position.

Eight years would follow.

Watch the blue Job cluster deepen and expand. The return to journalism, now with a dataviz identity fully formed.

In summer 2024, Flourish invited me to join a panel at the Online News Association conference called "Charting the News" — alongside folks from the AP. Yahoo Finance funded the trip. It was the first time my work and expertise had been put in a real spotlight, and I had a lot to say: scrollytelling in editorial contexts, designing for social platforms, building custom viz interfaces for election coverage.

The networking alone was worth it. Flourish and Canva brokered introductions, hosted events, pulled people into rooms together. I met Jeremy Caplan from CUNY's Newmark School of Journalism. And through a follow-up Data Vandals event, I met Jason Forrest — a dataviz person who also makes music. We hit it off immediately.

It was a good moment in a complicated year.

Watch the green Conference/Industry cluster light up almost overnight. The community I'd been part of for years, finally formalized.

The second Trump administration arrived like a weather system that never cleared. Executive orders, DOGE, tariffs, institutions under fire — a relentless drumbeat that made meaningful dataviz feel like a game of whack-a-mole. The data kept changing. The chaos was hard to chart, let alone contextualize.

The red flags were there. In May, Yahoo Finance was folded under a new executive whose background was sports media. The GM announced he was leaving. I was too distracted to read the writing on the wall.

The morning I had four teeth removed by an oral surgeon, a meeting happened. I came home in pain to emails and Slack messages that didn't put me at ease. By the time I was back in the office, something had visibly shifted. Graphics were ordered to cease. The new vision for Yahoo Finance did not include dataviz.

My first and only meeting with the new GM was on his second day. A calendar invite. A Google Hangout. I already knew.

Watch the gray LinkedIn Connection cluster explode. The network mobilizes.

The idea had been sitting there for months — a visualization of my parallel lives in graphics and music. More art project than data project, with no structure and no source. A batch of dry, unsoaked beans.

That purple cluster isn't a hobby. Bubble formed in 1993 from connections that started at PC Magazine. The Baggot Inn bookings, the Losers Lounge years, the antifolk scene, the power pop world — all of it running alongside every career chapter without pause, never asking permission from the day job.

Then, working on my weekly Chartwork Substack, I asked Claude how easy it would be to pull my LinkedIn connections data and map the types of relationships in it. Turns out they fall into categories quite neatly. Once I had the data I spent several weeks manually tagging every connection — cross-referencing emails, checking profiles, jogging memories. It was the most rewarding part of the whole project. A reminder of the remarkable people I've worked with over 30 years. And a quiet sadness that so many of those regular freelance relationships have simply... vaporized.

2,236 connections. Seven connection types. 234 distinct places where lives intersected. The purple music world — Baggot Inn, Losers Lounge, Bubble — running alongside every career chapter without pause. That's not a side project. That's half a life.

Maybe this piece makes people want to collaborate again. People already in the network, and maybe some who aren't yet.

The story isn't finished. The network keeps growing.